We’re an innovation agency that brings brand and people together

With Heart. With Mind.

5,686 APPLICATIONS IN FIRST THREE MONTHS (46% ABOVE THE 12-MONTH TARGET)

3.5M REACH ON SOCIAL MEDIA

5,047 STUDENT REGISTRATIONS AT EVENTS

OVER 200 MENTIONS IN THE MEDIA

The British Army challenged us to create and launch a new officer-specific recruitment drive, its first in eight years, and to target it at graduates. Our solution was a campaign that showcased the role of an Army officer as a highly-skilled career, one that offers leadership, challenge and the opportunity to do something that makes a difference.

We brought the role to life through a truck roadshow that toured 20 UK universities. The trucks were loaded with interactive and fully-immersive experiences, each element of which represented a different challenge faced by Army officers. They included an interactive film that gave students the chance to lead a humanitarian mission, Samsung Gear VR experiences of jumping with the Paras and driving a Challenger 2 tank, a virtual bleep test where students were paced by Sandhurst PTIs, and a full-body Oculus Rift experience of running the legendary Sandhurst obstacle course.

With Heart. With Mind.

For six years in a row, the British Army had been experiencing a steady decrease in application numbers for regular Army officer roles. They gave us the brilliantly challenging brief to turn that around.

Research showed that today’s graduates are looking for challenge and genuine responsibility from day one in their career. They want to do something that makes a difference and are not driven by money as they used to be.

We knew that a career in the Army provided all of this, fulfilling the desire to work with both heart and mind. This led to our first significant strategic decision. WITH HEART. WITH MIND.

Those words sprung directly out of what it means to lead as an Army officer. So we took them as our overarching theme and built a out brand that showcased the role of an Army officer as a highly-skilled career that offers leadership, challenge and the opportunity to make a difference.

We created a manifesto film to launch the brand. It took its inspiration from a speech given by General Sir Patrick Howard-Dobson, which features as the foreword in a book given to all new officer recruits on their first day at Sandhurst. Its emotive messaging added real depth to the brand and enabled us to successfully target the kind of graduates who not only wanted to learn and develop leadership skills but who were also driven by the values that are fundamental to being a successful Army officer.

F2 Freestylers

Over 2.1+ million views

The Army had just launched a new national recruitment campaign for soldiers under the title ‘A Better You’ and it wanted to use social media to maximise its reach and engagement amongst 16 to 17-year-olds.

Sport is a huge part of Army life so we arranged a tie-up with the world’s best football duo, the F2 Freestylers. The trick-shot sensations have spent years mastering every single technique in football to become the best at what they do and they want inspire every single person who loves and plays football to become as good as they can be.

We took the F2 guys to the Army Foundation College, in Harrogate, where all 16 to 17-year-old soldiers start their career. We filmed them showcasing some epic trick-shots before getting them to go up against some of the college’s junior soldiers.

From a shoot-out on the firing range to shooting hoops in the gym, the film became a great way to show off many of the college’s facilities and the kind of life you can expect as a junior soldier.

This first of a kind for the Army achieved 2.1+ million YouTube views and application figures for September entry into AFC Harrogate have shown an uplift.

Hide & Tweet

81% ENGAGEMENT

4,000+ NOMINATIONS MADE

50% UPLIFT IN APPLICATIONS

UP 43 PLACES IN THE GUARDIAN 300

Mars asked us to build on the success of its massively-effective and totally-groundbreaking TweetShop, but budget meant we couldn’t just transport the magical tweet-activated vending machine to more locations.

So we digitised TweetShop, creating an online competition that integrated Google Maps called #MarsHideAndTweet. We hid a virtual Tweetshop in a different European city every day for five days. Every day we tweeted clues to its location and people had to hunt it down on our custom map.

The first person to find and tweet its location to @marsgradsuk won a free weekend break for two people to that day’s city.

#MarsHideAndTweet enabled us to spread the word even further than we had been able to with the real TweetShop. We both boosted Mars’ profile amongst students and also its employer preference rankings, as well as squeezing every penny of value out of a tight budget.

Annual Appreciation Awards

81% ENGAGEMENT

4,000+ NOMINATIONS MADE

P&O Ferries was in the throws of re-aligning its consumer brand in the face of shifting customer expectations. They challenged us to help create a comprehensive programme of employee engagement that would harness the power of the new brand and motivate its people to take that journey with them.

We worked closely with the P&O team to bring the brand to life through an internal programme that had the key theme of ‘Recognise & Respond’. It incorporated everything from re-engineered and redesigned appraisals and job chats to a first-of-a-kind for P&O, an Annual Appreciation Awards programme to celebrate P&O people who had gone Above & Beyond to deliver everyday brilliance.

And what a celebration is was, nine months of planning capped by a spectacular event. It was distinctively P&O in everything from the 1.8m tall ampersand with brushed aluminium sides and colour-changing bulbs inside it that provided a spectacular entrance to the event, to the bespoke glass and acrylic ampersand trophies awarded to the winners.

We invited Andrew Castle, star of tennis and TV, to compere the evening. He was a natural choice because he has strong links with the local area and also with P&O from his youth. And as a fantastic curtain raiser, we called in the winners of the hugely popular Gareth Malone TV show, the now legendary P&O choir, to get everyone into the swing of things.

Being 7

Subsea 7’s corporate brand was well-established globally. But, following a merger, they asked us to provide clarity around who the company is and what it stands for as an employer.

We came up with ‘BEING 7’, a simple expression of all the things Subsea 7 people already believed in, an articulation of the qualities and behaviours that were intrinsic to day-to-day life in the business.

It was a brand build on solid research that enabled us to find out what working for Subsea 7 means to its people in each location, what attracted them to the business in the first place and what keeps them there.

We built it an extensive and comprehensive toolkit to bring the brand to life. It included brand guidelines, press, outdoor and online advertising, brochures, candidate packs, posters, exhibition stands, PowerPoint presentations, videos and web/intranet materials.

At the heart of every piece of communications was a BEING 7 story, an example of how an individual, a team or the whole business has demonstrated the company values. These materials are about inspiring people internally and externally, and bringing Subsea 7’s culture to life in way that is human, honest and engaging. That’s Being 7.

About

We’re a London-based brand activation and experience agency that delivers for clients all around the world. Creatively driven and purpose-led, we think disruptively and remove all the filters to help them find and create real fans.

Our work informs, engages and excites the talent they need. Because, at the end of the day, it’s all about people. What they see, hear and experience, whether you said it or not, will affect the decisions they make.

That’s why we always aim to create wonderful work that works.

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Everything we do starts with the question ‘I wonder?’ We asked ourselves that when we started writing this. I wonder why people would want to work with us? Would it be to work with great clients like the British Army, Police Now, Vodafone or AkzoNobel? Would it be the chance to go live with great tech and innovations that have won more awards than any other agency in the last 6 months? Or would it be the chance to do things never done before? We think it’s probably all three, so if you’re a Social Media Manager or Community Manager, Designer or Artworker get in touch and start wondering.Please email us at workwithus@tonic-agency.com